Last week there were warnings about a new virus that can destroy your collection of favorite family digital photos. Today it's a phishing scam that suspiciously resembles your bank's Web site. Tomorrow it may be an extortion attempt by a gang pretending to be IRS agents.

Who knows what it will be next week.

It's as if the only way to protect yourself is to disconnect your wireless card or broadband connection and stay of the Internet. It's impossible to escape the possibility that creepy things can seep inside your computer any time you are connected to the Internet.

Who knows what it will be next week.

It's as if the only way to protect yourself is to disconnect your wireless card or broadband connection and stay of the Internet. It's impossible to escape the possibility that creepy things can seep inside your computer any time you are connected to the Internet.

By turning off net access, you may miss an important message. You won't be able to see that Web site a friend desperately wants you to see. No more FaceBook, MySpace or aroundcentralflorida.com

Many computer users are not savvy enough to protect themselves from computer threat. Don't be bothered by that statement. There are many pros in the same boat.

A small company in Israel, Yoggie Security Systems , can change the way you look at threats with a device known as Yoggie. It comes in several flavors: Gatekeeper Pico Pro and Firestick Pro.

I've been using the Gatekeeper Pico Pro on my home computer since August 2007. I experienced a few minor problems that were solved via email.

A tech asked me to use a Yoggie utility program to send a diagnostic file via email. I looked at the file before I sent it and could not read it. It was encrypted just in case it contained info that could be used by a hacker. It makes sense.

If you are like the legions of computer users, it's easy to misplace the cap that comes with Yoggie. The developers thought of everything. The package includes two caps.

"There is no product similar to Yoggie," said Avi Dardik, a spokesman for Yoggie in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Dardik is correct in his assesment.

The Yoggie appears to resemble any of the ubiquitous USB thumb drives that inhabit pockets, purses and brief cases around the world. The difference ends right there. It's a firewall, anti-virus and anti-spam package all rolled into one device.

"It's a full blown computer," Dardik said in a telephone interview. "We'll never claim it is failsafe. There is no 100 percent solution."

The Yoggie Pico Pro contains three separate bits of USB enabled memory. One contains its Linux operating system for starting the device, a second portion to run the computer, and the third contains security systems that update themselves every 15 minutes. It also contains a Pentium computer chip to power the three memory devices.

The device boots a Linux operating system from one of the chips and copies it to the second piece. Then the first piece locks so that it can;t be hacked. The operatiung system on the second piece starts the array of software on the third. It's powered by a Pentium chip.

If installed correctly, Yoggie replaces the security software installed on your PC -- your lifeline to the Internet. By turning off and removing the existing security software, your computer can run a little faster. There is no longer a need to for daily scans of your hard disc. Hardware scans are intensive and can slow your computer during the scan.

The security functions provided by the Gatekeeper Pico Pro include:

Anti-virus

Anti-spyware

Anti-phishing

Anti-spam

Intrusion detection system / Intrusion prevention system

Firewall (stateful inspection)

Web filtering

Adaptive Security Policy

Multi-layer Security Agent

Layer-8 security engine

Transparent email proxies (POP3; SMTP)

Transparent Web Proxies (HTTP; FTP)

VPN Client

There may be a cost benefit too, according to Dardik.

Calculate the cost of annual upgrades for anti-virus, anti-spam software. It may be cheaper to buy a Yoggie. The street price for a Yoggie ranges from around $78 for the Firestick to $139 for the Pico Pro. A SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) sells for around $170. The SOHO device protects two computers on a small network.

How it works

The idea behind Yoggie is fairly simple. By using firewall, anti-spyware, anti-virus and anti-spam software on a device connected your computer with a USB port, network traffic gets diverted and screened first by the Yoggie Pico, where it kills the harmful traffic before passing the clean traffic onto your computer. The thinking, says Dardik, is that instead of your computer being the battlefield, "the war is being waged outside the laptop."

There is one minor weakness with Yoggie devices. If a friend or colleague provides you with a computer disk, scan it with the one-year Kaspersky software that comes with Yoggie. It requires an annual renewal.